Posted on October 28, 2011 at 7:02 PM

I took ARM TechCon by storm this week. I interview two product managers at NXP about their super cheap new line of 32-bit microcontrollers and I also interview an FAE at IAR Systems about the newest release of their Embedded Workbench. What do you think are the most important announcements to come out of ARM TechCon this year?

Posted on October 29, 2011 at 11:24 AM

Interesting to hear from NXP on 49c uC. Look forward to hear similar low cost chips from FPGA vendors too..

Posted on November 01, 2011 at 3:55 PM

Hi Amelia,
FPGA's have always been my first choice to design and protoype my projects that are mostly related to data compression in
bio-medical sensing, implementing different CODEC algo's etc.

My aim would be to model and design an efficient wireless system that should be easy to integrate with other technologies or infrastructures at a low cost.

The system is reading analog information recorded by a biomedical sensor in a transmitting unit attached to the patient. The recorded data is converted digitally using analog to digital converter. These digital data are given to FPGA Transmitter block. In transmitter block makes different processing on digital data like buffering, compression and framing. The compression technique is Run Length Encoding compression; it is lossless compression and framing of data achieved by HDLC protocol format. The transmitted data received by FPGA receiver block at receiver side. In the FPGA receiver block processing the data inversely like de-framing and de-compressing. VHDL will be used to implement the required functions of the FPGA blocks. Then the functional simulation is gonna be performed using Xilinx 9.2i simulator, the design will be synthesized using XILINX ISE.
In the FPGA transmitter block consist mainly Run Length Encoding (RLE) Compressor and High Data Link Control (HDLC) units.

It would be quite a deal implementing RLE using VHDL on Spartan 6. for these i will try different algo's on it.

I have been working on Spartan 3 i know some dont work..hope lies with Spartan6

Posted on November 02, 2011 at 12:53 AM

Hi Amelia,

I was at the ARM conference as well and really enjoyed it. Wish I had looked you up.

I am currently working on coding the base algorithms to server as the baseband radio for and SDR. The devices that I am currently working with don't have the horsepower to actually function in a usable bandwidth (say 70 mhz) but at least I can refine the code and get it working at lower frequencies.

I am hoping that the Spartan 6 will allow my to better refine my code at higher frequencies. My final goal is to have a fully functioning all mode radio that works from 1Mhz through 1Ghz in a cost effective package.

While the rapid pace of performance and cost improvements is unbelievable I still wish it was faster at times I agree with the previous poster that if we had a 49cent CPU married with a 49cent FPGA it would certainly make possible some incredible designs.